Ann Verdcourt - Sketches 27th August 17th September 2022 Courtesy of the Estate of Ann Verdcourt With essay by Moyra Elliott. Please note all works are sculptural and not functional.
1. Untitled (Cone 10) H450 x 800 x 400mm $3000 set
2. 2 Large White Bottles with Blue Wash H425; H370 x Dia.100mm $750 pair
3. 6 Bottles ( 1 x brown; 3 x white; 1 x milk) H315 x Dia. 95 x 5mm; H280 x W85mm $3000 set
4. 4 x Pairs of Pillows (tied thread) H115 130 x L195 x D135mm $750/pair
5. 11 Stacked Bowls with base $1000 set H205 x Dia.105mm; base 305 x 395 x 35mm
6. Vase of Strawberries (terracotta) 1983 H270 x Dia.155mm $950
7. Vase of Strawberries (pale red) H230 x W130 x D110mm $950
8. Terracotta Dish with 7 Pears (stoneware) H100 x D360mm $1500
9. Platter (patterned) H45 x W300 x D310mm $450
10. Platter (rounded edge) May 1980 H40 x 275 x 275mm $450
11. Egg Cup and Egg H185 x Dia.80mm; Egg L75 x Dia.60mm $600 set
12. Saucepan with Egg (stoneware pot) H145 x L230 x D170mm $600
13. Group with 2 Packets (3 beakers and 7 bowls) H215 x L455 x D240mm $3000 set
14. Blue Jug (wash look) H185 x L160 x D100mm $650
15. Black Gravy Jug H127 x L212 x D80mm $650
16. White/Cream Coffee Pot with Cup & Saucers, Bowl & Jug Set $3000 set H255 x L540 x D350mm
17. 4 Chalky Milk Cartons H265 x L95 x D90mm; H257 x L70 x D70mm $450 each
18. Bottles (cream, white, brown) L R H295/280/323/327/315mm $450 each 19. Green and Terracotta Bottles (2) H302 x Dia.80mm; H305 x Dia.75mm $450 each
20. Wide Bottles (3) $450 each H230 x W100 x D55; H280 x W130 x D95; H230 x W100 x D55mm
21. Flared green vase H205 x W195 x D95mm $450
22. Square frame H200 x L205 x D50mm $300
23. Yellow face (from What Makes Scary series) H145 x L110 x D50mm $400
24. Bottles (3 sq blue, one white) H230 x W55mm; H265 x W60; H230 x W60; H230 x W55mm $400 each
25. Cups with blue wash (2) H100 x Dia80; H115 x Dia70mm $600 pair 26. Cups (black and white stack, white mug) H110 x W85; H85 x W120mm $750 set
27. Pale green bottle H230 x Dia65mm $450 28. Cups (terracotta and white) H100 120 x Dia85 95mm $750 set
29. Cup and bowl (black and blue interiors) H112 x Dia90; H48 x Dia105mm $550 pair
30. Red bowl and cup H70 x Dia105; H120 x Dia85mm $650 pair
31. Freely Built Jug (white) H145 x W145 x D95mm $750
32. Juice box (with paper straw) H150 x L90 x D60mm $600
33. Brown packets (2) H190 x L135 x D45; H195 x L120 x D45mm $650 pair
34. White packets (3) $450 each H175 x L115 x D45; H180 x L140 x D45; H155 x L130 x D50mm
35. White packets (9) H125 240 x L75 140 x D45 75mm $450 each
36. Base (with markings) 395 x 305 x 35mm $300 37. Square base 305 x 305 x 35mm $300
38. Square base 310 x 310 x 35mm $300 39. Square base 295 x 295 x 35mm $300
ANN VERDCOURT 1934-2022. One of Ann Verdcourt’s earliest memories was crouching in a cupboard underneath the stairs in her home, as she and her twin sister clung together in their hiding place as bombs were dropped not far from her home. This was ‘the Blitz’ and the girls were about 6. She also remembered modelling the warm wax from candles that illuminated the bomb shelter in the family backyard while war planes rumbled overhead. Both memories were big influences in her future career. Her family was supportive of her love of drawing and making things with her hands and her talent was recognised by her school. When she was just 14 special arrangements were made that, provided she also passed her general examinations, she could attend school just one day a week and spend the other four days at the local Art School where she studied life drawing, anatomy, art history, architecture, painting, sculpture, clay modelling and wood carving plus illustration using a range of media, bookbinding, costume and weaving. Following this solid foundation, she went to Hornsea School of Art (later Middlesex University) where she took sculpture and ceramics as her majors. As she wrote, “being an art student in London in the 1950s was exciting. The Tate Gallery, the V&A, the British Museum and National Galleries had their collections on display, out of safe storage after the war… there were inspiring exhibitions and displays … Jackson Pollock, Henry Moore, Matisse…”. After graduation in 1955 she applied to Royal College where she was offered, not the sculpture course desired but a ceramics scholarship, however, not wishing to learn slip casting or spend a year at Stoke on Trent in the ceramic factories there, because the RCA course, then, had a strong commercial base, she declined. Returning home to Luton, Ann found varied and interesting work with commissions followed, in 1958, by teaching at her old art school where she met John Lawrence who was then Head of Department. They married in 1959.
In January 1965 they, with their two young children emigrated to New Zealand. John was to be art teacher at Tararua College in Pahiatua. They arrived with kilns and a wheel among their art supplies and found the burgeoning interest, by the public, in functional ceramic domestic ware. This was the era of Government restrictions on what might be imported to compete with domestic production from Crown Lynn and a few smaller manufacturers. This policy meant there was wide public interest with the hand made wares of small pottery enterprises and John and Ann set about making pots in whatever spare time they could find. Retailers in New Zealand were delighted to
Increasing complexity is evident when she leaves European sources and tackles McCahon’s painting, ‘The Promised Land’ by retaining its structure but giving it a very different meaning. For Verdcourt this painting was about washing the family dishes as stacked bowls morphed from the foreground hillsides and the towering angel figure is tied to the house while it is Ann herself, only in a farmer’s black singlet, that is contemplating the jug, cups and candlestick that remain on the
find another source of well made pots and this extra income was supplemented by Ann’s teaching clay at Training College and at the evening classes which were so avidly attended all across the country in those times, thanks to the Tovey ‘arts access for all’ policies. John and Ann moved to Dannevirke in 1970 to a small farm property, ‘Rosevilla’, where they again set up a pottery, mainly manned by John while Ann found her days filled by her two children while occasionally exhibiting in group shows. Her opportunity to expand beyond this came with Luit Beiringa, and Margaret Taylor of the Manawatu Art Gallery. She was invited to participate in a 1980 exhibition that was being drawn together, to later tour to the Sarjeant in Whanganui, called ‘Still Life is Still Alive’. Her modelling abilities had been noted and she was asked to provide a number of vessels in the style of Morandi so that members of the public and students could draw and paint from them within the gallery space. Familiarity with Morandi’s visual vocabulary had been hers since London in the 1950s where his work could be viewed at the Tate and the Courtauld galleries. This reacquaintance with and working from those paintings was to set her path for much of the remainder of her career. Initially it was a solo show at The Dowse, when it was steered by James Mack, called, ‘Still Life’, that encouraged her to explore further some of the ideas she traversed in working for the earlier exhibition. Over the course of the following almost forty years she mined her upbringing in post war Britain and particularly those seven years studying the arts in two excellent colleges and the multitude of collections in galleries and museums. Those memories plus her scrutiny of the armloads of books on art, mostly 20thC., with which she returned from the Dannevirke Library, having ordered them from the rural library service, were fundamental to her ongoing engagement with painting, rather than sculpture, as primary source. These elements were underpinned by her fecund imagination and subversive humour applied with intelligence, restraint and an ongoing pleasure in what possibilities can lie with clay. She delighted in turning an image into three dimensions and while initially, she stayed within the framework indicated by the painting it was not long before she used those abundant abilities to “see what else was there”.
Who could forget works like the series around dishes of bananas where the patterns on decaying skin steadily transferred to the dish, until there was a pair of naked bananas lying upon the skin textured dish. Or, the nest with eggs tucked inside the back of Magritte’s ‘Man in a Bowler Hat‘s hat. As she continued, more complex questions occurred and the ‘unknown views’ were sought more vigorously. ‘The Velasquez Girls’ mixed historical styles of dress and of rendering with aids – a wheeled trolly! to allow movement in such cumbersome clothing as well as ideas about what might be hiding behind those vast panniers and towering hairstyles. The mixing of influences can also be seen in clothing from one painter’s subject adorning another subject: Matisse’s Romanian blouse clothes a model styled like a painting by Modigliani.
Moyra Elliott, 2022
prospect her sensitive searching for her version of anatomical truth and perhaps finding something other eyes had passed by. ‘Ceremonial Elbow’, she claimed, was “in honour of the naked Nubian body” a programme viewed on TV where the lithe, angular, elongated figures were clothed only in clay slips white with black spots and the movement lissom as they strode an arid land. And in, “I’ve only met Richard at parties’, she makes a grouping of versions of one man’s head someone she knew very little but found his head worthy of photographing from a number of angles, and modelled seven versions, each subtly and intriguingly different, then assembled them into a formation so that, while kept largely monochromatic, their differences in expression and projection could be considered. Morandi was often in the background. Like the master, she grouped simple domestic pieces objects one might come across on a daily basis in a rural farmhouse in New Zealand. She would retreat into the laundry – her workshop, and model yoghurt containers, jars, packets, cups and bowls only her barely submerged sense of humour would substitute a current cardboard milk container instead of a glass milk bottle. Then she’d spend time assembling and reassembling, replacing and making anew until every angle of every piece satisfied her critical eye and always marshalled upon a specially made shelf, dish or tray. She left nothing to chance and was happy to hold pieces for years until its comfortable companions arrived. And so it went. Many groups and series, all contemplated for long periods, from every angle, for weeks or months before anyone else might view them, adjustments and changes made as seen necessary until the work satisfied her. Clay was her preferred medium – she was never tempted by bronze casting as she knew that clay could offer her every possible surface and colour. Its use meant her fingers, perhaps the very cleverest in the country, were constantly engaged, responding to what her eyes observed and her astutely whimsical intelligence imagined. Another medium would mean she must pass some parts of the process to others, which did not interest her she simply loved to make. Her absence will leave a gap that no one can fill, not only for her beloved John who followed her some few months later and their family but for us all. She was uniquely a one off.
draining board. But there is no question that she might suffer defeat. Her gaze is resolutely Otherconfident.departures